Albanian passport

The Albanian passport is a travel and identity document that is issued to citizens who are nationals of Albania, and allows them to travel abroad^[1]. The authority responsible for issuing is the Ministry of Interior.

 Starting in May 2009, the Albanian Government, as part of a larger project to modernize and bring to the best international standards, has started issuing biometric passport ^[2] and biometric ID card^[3] for its citizens. From 1 January 2011 the biometric will be the only Albanian passport in circulation. In order to get the passport each Albanian citizen may go to the local post office and pay the price of 6,000 (six thousand) lek (€50) and afterwards go to the Registry office of the municipality where the person is photographed, and the fingerprints are digitized. The data collected are sent to the center of production in Tirana. Before delivery to the holder, the biometric passport and the electronic ID card need to be activated by reading the fingerprints of the holder with a special device that recognizes the correspondence with impressions that are present in the microchip. The ideation and the way of producing the new Albanian e-Passport is made in front of a single civil servant (personal identification, photographing, finding fingerprints, and digital signature) makes this document one of the most reliable and advanced in the world.^{[citation needed]} The switch to a biometric passport was one of the conditions for the Schengen Area visa liberalization for the citizens of Albania^[4]